The Use of Videos for UFO Investigation

Overview

The 90s has by far been the most interesting for UFO research. In the past the major form of communication has been through reports after the fact with information going through many hands and the original source subject to the same human influences that a person under stress would exhibit.

Often the information is coloured by the imagination or the trauma that the person was under during the sighting. Information gathered this way must be considered suspect at best. Video, on the other hand, is exempt from human trauma, what the camera sees is indisputable and as close as we are likely to get to actually being there.

Video Course

This course is divided into Two components.

• The first concerns an understanding of the hardware, the "how to" of taking a video, we will introduce the investigator into what constitutes a good video, the types of videos and how you, as an investigator, become a consultant to your experiencer with the camera.
  
  
• The second is a basic introduction into computer analysis techniques and resolving data from the videos. If time permits there will be an introduction to what is happening in the video field with respect to camera technology.
  
  
  

Video Cameras

Camcorders or Video Cameras can be divided into a number of categories depending on the type of medium recorded on, the resolution available s-video or composite (lower resolution) and the optics available on the camera determining available zoom range.

Other features of a camera reflect on the degree of control a person has over the operation of a camera. Can I control the focus manually, can I switch from automatic to manual control? This is important as, under certain conditions, a camera will drift in and out of focus while under automatic control.

To be able to control the aperture speed is another feature most valued. It determines how the relative speed of an object is treated by the camera. If the aperture speed is set to fast (in a relatively high lit area) then the "sharpness" of the object viewed is high from frame to frame, if not then there will be a certain fuzziness associated with motion.  

Other hardware

Second to a camera is a tripod. Little thought is given to the use of a tripod and it is often understated in terms of importance. When a camera zooms into a subject the apparent movement, if hand held, is magnified to such an extent that the image can become quite shakey and unwatchable. What is more important is that if the video is subject to capture to a computer there has to be a lot of processing to reduce or eliminate this effect, this introduces errors and artifacts thus reducing the quality of the information.

Many of the new cameras employ a form of digital image stabilization. This initially seems a good idea until you realise that this will inevitably introduce other types of artifacts and could actually "mask" out the real movement of the object (imagine that the object really was jittering and the stabilisation effectively eliminated this); in the end we need to have video information as close to the original as to be indistinguishable from being there.

In summing up ö the ideal camera has the ability to be manually controlled, a tripod is invaluable, the higher the resolution the better.

The ideal video

Chances are we will not be in a position to take a video of a UFO ourselves, we still need to be aware of what we need to do to get one for reasons I will mention at the end of this video course. Generally there are two types of UFO sightings ö day and night. Both require a different approach, both will produce similar information.

A video gives us a lot of potential information. It visually describes the object, the colour, the relative size to other objects, the way it moves, etc. It also records an audio transcript of what impressions were left on the experiencers. All in all a good video is invaluable and is as close as we are going to get to being there ourselves.

The day time encounter.

Take a view in wide angle to get the UFO with some other objects such as trees, cars, people, clouds, etc. This effectively identifies the size of the object, the height, direction and also the position relative to known objects on the Earth. Zoom into the object, making sure the camera is mounted on a tripod. Take off the auto focus and manually focus once you are fully zoomed into the object. Take as much video as possible during the time of the viewing keeping track of the object. Use the audio as a record of what you are feeling, what you are seeing, the effect it has on other people.

The night time encounter

Cameras donât like low light. This introduces noise because the camera has to amplify the video signal to such an extent that ccd noise becomes significant. The logic required to perform auto control becomes very stressed and we find that we get focus drift due to the electronics being unable to accurately sync onto any useful video signals, so it is even more important to manually take control.

Most sightings at night will be just lights in the sky, the nature of human vision is that we see things bigger than they really are. Simply, the camera will only take a small part of what we think we see, the image being smaller than expected. Because the camera will not pick up surrounding objects there is no point of reference, to correct for this you take a wide angle shot during the night encompassing the object and what you believe are objects on the ground.

The following day pay a return visit and place the camera in the same position and take a shot with the same wide angle settings. This effectively fills in the missing information for you.

Interviews and Audio recording

Take as much video as possible during the time of the viewing keeping track of the object. Use the audio as a record of what you are feeling, what you are seeing, the effect it has on other people. After the sighting, take video of witnesses and interview them getting their personal details for follow up ö Name, phone number, address, what they saw, what they felt.

It is important to remain as impersonal and unemotional as possible during the interviews so as to prevent leading the witnesses through their account, this has an effect of actually calming the witness and bringing more rational dialogue to the interview process. Now that you have the knowledge the next phase is imparting this knowledge to your experiencers. By setting up your experiencers with this knowledge they will be in a better position to deliver better quality videos which you can pass on to the analyser. Half of your job is done.

The next part of your job is to pass the results of analysis back to the witnesses, this can be done through meetings or other means.

Computer Analysis

Having got the video the first thing to do is to make a high quality copy. This is your working copy for analysis purposes. The original should be placed in a suitable container and stored in a cool dry place out of the way of magnetic influences. The owner should be advised of this and a copy given to him (with the sealed original) should he want to show others, the original should be used minimally.

"Work the Video"

Using a high quality VCR with a clean stable stop frame display (ideally with a digital TBC ö time base corrector) watch the video over and over. Look at the object and surrounding areas. Where necessary do a single frame jog/shuttle about areas which capture your attention, it is often during these periods where other information comes out and other objects materialise, often changing significantly from one frame to the next.

Note the positions on tape where areas are of interest.

Determine what you want to obtain

1. Movement from frame to frame can be used to calculate speed, distance, height and direction.
2. Size calculation from relative known objects.
3. Colour, shape.
4. Other information, other objects?

Systems

The computer systems as of today fall into two categories. The first being the professional workstation employing purpose built hardware and software set up specifically for capture and analysis. Second being based upon PC hardware with capture cards and off the shelf software. Most of the second are either Macintosh or Pentium processor based systems with significant processing power and storage.

An example is the system I have has a Pentium 100Mhz CPU, 64Mbytes RAM, 6 Gbytes of hard disk ö this is the hardware. The software starts off with Windows NT V4.0, Video for Windows capture drivers, Adobe Premier V4.2 for Video processing and Adobe Photoshop for single image processing and analysis. Additional plugins enable further processing options.

Outcomes

After all of the above the analysis remains subjective to a high degree. It partly falls into the realm of scientific method but it is only one of many tools to be used to assist in identifying the UFO phenomena. Mostly it may clearly identify that the object is in fact an IFO once and for all, this is more important than having the object remain unidentified to the witness. If the object remains unidentified we can assign certain value to the sighting, its size, shape, colour, speed, altitude, etc. information which can be categorised for correlation with future sightings.

New Technology In Cameras

Sony, as of 1998, have introduced a range of cameras which are supposedly zero light enabled. This means that they function in complete darkness. How does this work?

Those of you who have seen my earlier presentations know that the ccd element used in these cameras are sensitive to infrared light, this having been demonstrated by shining a remote control from a VCR into the front of the lense. The viewed image demonstrates how the infrared is converted into white light by the camera electronics.

What Sony have done is to remove the infrared filter normally placed in front of the lense. This enables all of the infrared light emitted or reflected from a nocturnal object to be processed by the camera and displayed as normal white light, effectively seeing in the dark. To improve this process you can get infrared flood lights (a spotlight with an infrared filter passing infrared placed in front of the light).

This is a further turning point in the field of videography and I expect great things to happen as a consequence.